Shreyas Meher (U Texas at Dallas) and Pengfei Zhang (U Texas at Dallas, Cornell U) have posted “Two Types of Censorship” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Not all autocracies are doing the same kind of censorship. Countries like China build a closed border and a policing workforce for their internet, whereas countries like Russia compete in their internet with pro-government messages and requests. This paper employs a data-driven approach to study the variety of censorship among autocratic countries. Internet controls are measured by the panel data from Freedom House, V-Dem, OONI, and Google Transparency Report. Using an unsupervised learning technique of cluster analysis, we group the countries’ censorship behaviors based on multi-dimensional indicators of internet access, content restriction, and technological barriers. We discover two distinct types of censorship: pervasive control regime (e.g., China) and influence operation regime (e.g., Russia). The two types are supported by country-specific studies and are shown to predict the country’s content restriction strategies. We also show that differences in national IT capacity explain a country’s distinct censorship style. Sending takedown requests is a cost-saving alternative to a state-run monitoring workforce. A one-unit increase in the country’s IT capacity leads to 9,206 fewer requests and 11,398 more incidents of blocking the internet annually.